


The Children

by Allicat9



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:14:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 3,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26715835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allicat9/pseuds/Allicat9
Summary: Dean and Sam have saved many people over their long hunting careers. Here is a look at what happened to the children who's lives they touched.
Relationships: Castiel & Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 5
Kudos: 39





	1. Lucas Barr

Lucas Barr kills himself on his fifteenth birthday. 

Turns out, nearly being drowned by a ghost can give you a warped sense of reality. Can make you dwell on life and death. Can make you just a little too odd, a little too off, a little too crazy. 

He and his mom talk openly about what happened at first. She probably thought it would be good for him, would help him process. Hell, maybe it helped her process. It didn't work. What it did do is keep the memory top of mind. The ghost was gone, but Lucas was haunted. It never went away, and nothing he did would banish it.

No one liked him. His town was small, they didn't leave-even after everything that happened. He grew up quiet and he grew up weird- the kid that liked sitting in a corner drawing, surprise, surprise, didn't have many friends. Any friends, actually. 

When no one likes you, when you're alone, and when you know for sure that there is something waiting on the other side- well it makes everything just a little too easy. It was easy to walk to the water's edge. It was easy to walk in. It was easy to sink, down, down, down, the light giving way to cold darkness. Lucas barely thought about his mom once he made up his mind. She would follow him sooner or later.


	2. Missy Bender

They lock you up. Your lawyer requests leniency, but the judge doesn’t seem inclined to show mercy to a not quite twelve year old murderer. That’s what you are, afterall. All those people-dozens. Killed, right in front of you-and you did nothing. You helped. You liked it a little. A lot, if your honest. But you are never honest. They squealed like pigs when they died. It was funny. When you say that, your lawyer gets all quiet. She doesn't want to look at you

You get ten to twenty years in prison. Out in time to have a life, they say. They think you can be rehabilitated. They are wrong. You strangle your first roommate. You stab your second. The first one dies. The guards come too quickly the second time. Too bad. So much for out in time to have a life. You will never leave prison again. 

You don't want comfort. You don't need what you've never had. Prison is fun- plenty of girls to torment. The hospital isn't as fun until you figure out how to lure some of the patients away from the watchful eyes of the nurses. You learn that fingers can be bitten off as easy as carrots. You learn that dark blood means death and light blood means you can keep going for as long as you want. You lean what eyes feel like in your hands. 

You barely remember the men who killed your family. Their faces are blurry. You were too young, you weren't happy then. But if you ever see them again, you'd thank them. They helped you find your real purpose. They made your life better. You owe them everything.


	3. Michael Rueger

Michael becomes a hunter. He couldn't have become anything else. Not after what he'd seen. Not after what almost happened to his little brother. Michael is a protector, he needs to keep his family- his mom and his brother- safe from the things that go bump in the night. To do that, he needs to become like Sam and Dean Winchester. He needs to be prepared. 

He waits until he graduates high school- he can give his mom that. He studies harder than he ever has in his life. He looks for odd happenings on the internet, in newspapers. He waits. His mother notices her son's sudden interest in all things supernatural. She tries to talk to him. He pretends it works. 

When Michael leaves home for the last time, he doesn't bring his little brother with him. Honestly, it never crosses his mind. He doesn't tell his family where he's going. As far as they know he's a drifter, doing menial jobs around the country, never really settling down. He wants to keep it that way. 

Its a lonely life- being a hunter. But as time goes on, Michael gets better. He gets used to the solitude, and he gets better at hunting- the close calls become not so close. Five, six years on, and he is sure he never had any other dreams, never wanted to be anything else. 

Soon there is nothing but the road. Nothing but the hunt. His contact with his mother and brother slows, then stops. He checks in on them from time to time, and they seem happy. Its better if he's not in their lives, if things go wrong for him now, there will be nothing for them to miss. 

Michael becomes a hunter. After meeting Sam and Dean Winchester, he couldn't have become anything else.


	4. Tyler Thompson

Tyler is nine when the ghost tries to drown her. Mom insists that nothing of the kind happened and that Tyler is imagining things. But she knows the truth. She remembers. Funnily enough, you don’t forget nearly being drowned by the ghost of your grandmother’s sister. It’s just one of those things that sticks with you. 

Oh she tries to forget. At first she really, really tries. But then, around twelve or so, she stops trying so hard. Because even though it was scary (and it was) and even though the ghost tried to kill her (and it did) Tyler misses the fun. She misses the games. She misses magic being real. So she stops trying to forget and starts trying to remember, trying to learn. 

Being a witch is harder than it looks. She has no natural gift. She doesn’t know any witches that could show her the way. But she has her grandmother’s pictures. She has the symbols from the maid. She starts small, a little research into the occult here, a small summoning spell there. Nothing big- nothing flashy. She's good, very good. Eventually, she yearns for flashy.

Flashy is contacting ghost and summoning demons. Flashy is making Jeremy Righorn fall in love with her. She is the luckiest, prettiest, most popular girl in her whole class. She is a badass witch, and she is absolutely _killing_ it. She is careful, she is smart. So what if she deals with demons? She plans to live forever. She bets that she can figure immortality out. It can't be that hard. Magic, she's found, can do anything, as long as you put your mind to it.

The Winchesters showed her that the world could be magical. Now, she is magical too.


	5. Ben Braedan

There are things Ben and his mom _Don’t Talk About_.

They don’t talk about the accident. They tried to once, but the details slipped and slid around and neither of them could quite piece together what happened. They stopped trying after that. They don’t talk about how the neighbors whisper about them. When they get back from the hospital, no one can meet their eyes. People still whisper behind their backs, even now, years later. Ben knows there was some sort of investigation-someone had been killed while they were away. But he doesn’t ask and his mother never tells.

They _definitely_ don’t talk about that guy they see sitting outside their house, sometimes, just watching them. The one with the cool car and the sad eyes. They don’t talk about how they both recognize him from the hospital. How he feels familiar, just a little. But when they notice him he’s always quick to leave. They don’t talk about it when he starts coming by, a few months after the accident. They don’t talk about it when he stops, about a year later.

They _never_ talk about Ben’s dad. Once upon a time, Ben had a father. He knows he did. Somewhere. Sometime. Someone filled that space. Sometimes, before he’s really awake, he’ll smell leather and motor oil and feel the echo of rough, thick fingers tosseling his hair. But as soon as he blinks awake, the echos retreat leaving a sick, hollow feeling in their place. Some things they just don’t talk about. And they never will.

Maybe it's better that way.


	6. Claire Novak

She is not their fault. She is Castiel’s sin. And it is a sin, as much as he would like to deny it.

Angels are not perfect beings. They are capable of lying. They are capable of trickery and deceit. They are capable of cruelty. Castiel knows all of this from experience. Castiel thinks that it was very cruel of him to take Claire’s father from her. And crueler still to forget about Jimmy’s family-for  _ years-  _ while he was off saving and destroying the world. Jimmy begged Castiel to protect them and he did not. He failed. He chose to fail. 

He killed Amelia, he knows this. He didn’t mean to, but he did. And he made Claire into what she is. A hunter. Again, an accident, but that doesn't mean it isn’t his fault. There are worse things, Dean reminds him. Castiel can only think of demons. Hunters at least can sometimes rest, can sometimes have a modecom of peace before they are thrown back into their personal hells. Claire is not a demon, and he chooses to be grateful. When he expresses this, Sam’s face twists up and Dean goes silent. Saying the wrong thing has always been a strong suit of his. 

Claire does not want him around. He can understand that. After all, he is not her father, he just wears his face. Castiel guesses that it is likely disturbing for her to see her father’s familiar face on a stranger. He nearly took her, once, long ago-and Castiel wonders if that would have been better, somehow. Her soul would be with her parents’ souls right now, in Heaven, instead of stuck here in this imperfect, painful existence. But he also recognizes that such choices are not in his power to make. He’s already made that mistake once. 

Claire is no longer the little girl in Jimmy’s memories that could get excited about anything and loved twirly dresses. She scowls at carefree girls her own age. Castiel supposes it's difficult to be excited when you see and fight real live monsters nearly every day. She paints her nails black and almost immediately chips away the polish. Castiel wonders if that means anything. 

He notices when she smiles. She so rarely does. Claire smiles at the Winchesters. Castiel thinks she likes them, in her own distant, bitter, way. She smiles at Jody. She smiles at Annie. They want to be her family. Maybe, one day, she will let them in. Maybe, one day, she will be just a little bit happy. Maybe one day, she will love. Castiel hopes so. He fervently hopes he hasn’t ruined her life. 

An angel should not care about the wellbeing of one teenage girl. But Castiel does care. It’s part of becoming human, he guesses.  _ Caring _ . He cares about Claire. Not enough. Not how her father did. Not how her mother did. But he does. 

****  
  



	7. Ethan Montgumery

The Winchester brothers kill his father before he’s even born. He never meets them. He doesn’t know their names. He doesn’t even know they exist. But nevertheless, they change his life.

They killed his father. They killed his father before he’s even born. Ethan is only ever told that his father went crazy and his mother had to leave. He is told his father killed himself. He is told his mother was lucky to escape. But he never asks why.

No one tells him what he is. No one tells him what is to come. He doesn’t know himself. Not until he turns thirty. Not until he feels it. The _hunger_.


	8. Robert-John Campbell

He should have known that was all a lie. 

Really, he should have guessed. Whenever he asked his mother to tell the story of how she rescued him from the shapeshifters, how his father was killed during his rescue, the details were always just a bit fuzzy. He should have asked why the shapeshifters wanted him in the first place. It had never occurred to him.

Whenever he asked about his father, Christian Campbell, the heroic and noble hunter from a family of heroic and noble hunters, his mother would say nothing but platitudes, no specifics. 

“He was so brave.” She would say. 

“He was so good.” She would whisper. 

“You are all I have left of him.” she would sigh. Bobby believed her. Bobby was stupid. He sometimes wonders why she even bothered with the lie. He suspects it was more for her than for him, in the end. 

Nothing really prepares you for your sloughing off. It happens for the first time just after his mother’s funeral. Bobby assumes it was a stress response. Maybe he shifted when he was little, and he just doesn’t remember. It's only been him and his mom for so long, he doesn’t know. It’s clear then that he is not human, that his mother had left out some  _ very  _ important information when recounting his rescue. 

When he found out what he was, he made it his mission to find out everything he could about the Campbells, about his father, about his real family. He finds out bits and pieces. The Campbells were a famous, large hunting family that died out in the early 2010s, somehow related to the infamous Winchester brothers. Christian Campebell, from what he can tell, wasn’t killed by shifters, but may have been involved in a fight against a vampire alpha. No monster he “questions” has the full story. 

He figured that somehow, the Campbells had stumbled across him, a baby shifter, while his real family was busy collecting him from whatever poor woman his real father had knocked up. A fight likely ensued, the shifters clearly lost. His mother had always told him she wanted children- maybe keeping him had fulfilled that part of her, somehow. 

Bobby John didn’t know if his real family had ever taken him back from the Campbells. Maybe his mother’s rescue story wasn’t a lie, just embellished. Maybe she really had tracked him down, battled the shifters for him, and rescued him. Bobby John didn’t know what to think. The mother he knew, the mother who raised him, wasn’t naturally cut out for violence. The woman he knew hunted out of some perverted need to pay tribute to her dead husband and his family. She was good- but good enough to kill all those shifters, alone? 

The last of the Campbells and he’s not even human. There’s some irony there. He hopes they all burn in hell and he hopes that they are all at peace. Did they save him? Did they damn him? He doesn’t know. But he does know how to hunt. He was raised in the life after all. The monsters out there never see him coming. 

He will hunt down his kind and he will kill them, as many as he can, for as long as he can. After all, its the family business. 


	9. Jacob Pond

Dean Winchester stabs his mother through the heart and leaves Jacob to starve.

Jacob can’t go home after that. He isn’t big enough to hunt. And how would he explain his need to eat human flesh to foster care?

Jacob Pond dies, alone, about a year later, in an ally just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. 

Maybe, years down the road, Dean Winchester will wonder what became of the solemn little boy who swore vengeance on him. But then again, maybe not.


	10. Emma

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma was a character with so much potential.
> 
> Comments and kudos are welcome!

Dean can’t help but think of  _ her _ , when they learn that everything they ever killed has been let out of whatever pit he and his brother sent them to. He knows  _ she’s  _ back. He can sense her- like a severed limb that still pangs, like an echo in the forest, like a shadow on the wall. 

He tries not to think of the frail teenage girl who came to kill him. He tries not to remember how she looked sitting on that motel bed. How she seemed to glow- her pale face framed with auburn hair and his eyes. He tries not to think of her, broken and bloody on the floor. About the place she went after that- a place that still gives him nightmares. But, like with so much else in his life, he fails. 

She was his. No matter what Sam said, Emma was his daughter. His daughter died, alone and afraid, bleeding out on a motel floor because of him. Yes, she was born an Amazon. Yes, she was trying to kill him. But Dean Winchester knows when he sees a killer. And Emma hadn’t been. Not yet. He could have stopped her.  _ They  _ could have stopped her. He knows it in his bones. 

He’d nearly killed Lisa. He’d nearly killed Ben. He’d definitely destroyed their lives and then done a piss poor job of sellotaping them back together. He’d let his brother shoot his daughter right in front of him, before she’d ever gotten the chance to truly live. Only a monster could be responsible for so much pain and upset. 

Dean Winchester holds these truths to be self evident- that he breaks everything he touches. That he kills everything he loves. That he is not worth saving. That destruction and chaos follow him everywhere he goes. That if Emma is out there, he needs to stay far away from her. 

But then they win. 

They win, and God is defeated and the world is set right and the story becomes their own. 

He lets himself think, for a brief moment, that he isn’t a monster. That there is some other way for his life to end. He gets a dog. He applies for a job. And he thinks about finding Emma. About rewriting the ending to their story. But even when he has control of the narrative, when the pen is in his hand, it ends the way he always knew it would. 

* * *

Emma rises from the dead just outside of Seattle, Washington. 

She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t run. She doesn't indulge her feelings. Purgatory cured her of that weakness. Instead, she stands up quietly, and she walks until she hits the city. She still looks about fourteen, and people bend over backwards to help her, even while the world collapses around them all. 

She wakes up one day in her ‘foster home’, weeks later, and everyone but the monsters are gone. That’s the most scared she becomes. The silence presses down on her and she is sure the world is ending. Then the world shifts again. Something pulls at her, tugs at her, then releases. Everyone comes back, like they never left, and the world starts spinning again. 

After that, she tries to be a real girl, for a moment. For a shining, gleaming, moment she is no one but herself. She ‘grows up.’ She goes to high school, but doesn’t have the money for college. She gets an apartment. She gets a job. She goes on some dates, just to try it out.

But then hunters get wind of her somehow, and Emma has to flee her boring, perfect, human life. It happens again, and again, and again. Over and over. She sleeps in her car. She steals to eat. She is always on the road. Always running. Never staying in one place for too long. The days of running blur together, until she can’t tell weeks from years. 

She is told, somewhere, sometime, that Dean Winchester is dead. She lets herself feel it, for a moment. And then she carries on. It's pointless to mourn a man that never loved her. 

Sometimes, the hunters catch up to her. She kills them all. Every. Single. One. 

She is a monster. And there is no end for her but bloody. 


End file.
